Plans for Eclipse’s annual release train had been well in
place before Juno’s arrival, and whilst it’s fair to say that
the Eclipse Foundation’s attention has been devoted to easing the
e4 platform problem, Kepler progress has been steady.

Milestone 3 sees plenty of additional features to the Eclipse
platform, Eclipse Java Development Tools (JDT) and the Plug-in
Development Environment (PDE). It’s the latter that looks to have
received the biggest overhaul, with M3 introducing a new PDE Image
Browser view and new default execution environments for launch
configurations.

For JDT, the compiler now detects unused type parameters
automatically plus there’s an option to omit @Override for
interface methods. The platform itself now includes an option to
create a launch configuration warning dialog, to warn users of
problematic settings. A useful addition for sure.

It’s worth checking out the previous New and Noteworthy posts to
see some of the preparation towards Kepler (M1
and M2). With Juno seeing a record number of projects
join the release train, it’ll be interesting to see the final tally
of projects for 2013’s effort.

Some have already showcased their plans, such as people behind the
Eclipse Mylyn project and we’ll no doubt see more pen blogposts
in the coming weeks, now their strategy is crystal clear. The
aforementioned performance problems in e4 are currently being
tackled, and we should see improvement in Kepler, if not
earlier.